DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- For the part, history is filled with missed opportunities. Perhaps the biggest one for our country came two decades ago.

On Dec. 7, 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev went before
the United Nations and gave a speech that changed history. In that
speech, Gorbachev renounced violence and the threat of violence to
hold the Soviet empire together.

"Necessity of the principle of freedom of choice is clear,"
Gorbachev said. "Denying that right of peoples, no matter what the
pretext for doing so, no matter what words are used to conceal it,
means infringing even that unstable balance that it has been possible
to achieve. Freedom of choice is a universal principle, and there
should be no exceptions."

That day, Gorbachev said the Soviet Union would cut its
conventional forces by 500,000 men, which meant most of the Red
Army's units would be leaving Eastern Europe. Within a year of his
speech, the Berlin Wall came down, free elections were held in Poland
and Czechoslovakia and a mostly nonviolent democratic revolution
swept through Eastern Europe. Within three years of his speech, the
Soviet Union itself was defunct.

It wasn't the massive military buildup by the United States
during the 1980s that forced Gorbachev's hand. It was the growing
demand for democracy by the captive nations of the Warsaw Pact, as
well as the inherent failures of the Soviet social and economic
system, that made Gorbachev's declaration inevitable.

In that historic moment when the Soviet empire crumbled,
there was an opportunity for the United States. We could have reached
out to Russia and Eastern Europe with a modern-day version of the
Marshall Plan to rebuild their shattered economies as we did the
nations of Western Europe after World War II.

Instead, Russia and other Eastern European nations were used
as laboratories to try out the free market economic theories of Nobel
laureate Milton Friedman - privatization of all public functions,
drastic cutbacks in social welfare programs and removal of all rules
and regulations that stood in the way of making a profit.

While Ronald Reagan's America and Margaret Thatcher's Britain
had approved bits and pieces of the Friedman model, no multi-party
democracy in the world has ever willingly adopted the whole thing. As
outlined in Naomi Klein's best-selling book, "The Shock Doctrine,"
the only way the full Friedman vision has been achieved has been by
either exploiting the chaos of war or a natural disaster, or by
creating the disaster through a coup or economic dislocation.

The imposition of the Friedman blueprint - what became known
as "The Washington Consensus" - was a precondition for getting aid
from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It managed
to turn Russia from a superpower to an economic basket case in less
than a decade.

Ironically, it was the collapse of communism that made
Friedmanism possible. The Marshall Plan was conceived as an
alternative to communism and the United States allowed the European
welfare state that emerged after the war to emerge as a compromise
between capitalism and communism.

Without a competing ideology, and with the prevailing feeling
in the United States that it "won" the Cold War, capitalism no longer
had to worry about compromise. It was now free to be as rapacious,
anti-social and anti-democratic as it pleased.

But things can change quickly. When Vladimir Putin replaced
Boris Yeltsin as Russia's president, he put an end to the fire sale
of Russia's assets, particularly its oil and natural gas reserves.
And when energy prices started to rise, Putin's Russia suddenly
wasn't a basket case anymore. It now has lots of money and a bunch of
grudges to settle.

Take the U.S. foreign policy decisions of the past few years
by the Bush Administration - encouraging the former Soviet republics
to buy American armaments and join NATO, unilaterally scrapping the
Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, signing deals to put an anti-ballistic
missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, establishing
military bases in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia - and
you can see why Russia is angry.

This is not to justify Russia's invasion of Georgia and its
increasing hostility toward the United States. But it does
demonstrate what happens when a victor shabbily treats the vanquished
after a war.

If our nation had treated Russia the way that Germany and
Japan were treated after the end of World War II - with soft power,
multilateral diplomacy, constructive engagement and encouraging
democratic change - chances are that Russia would have been a
friendly and cooperative ally instead of an enemy.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for
nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade
Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.